Discussion and analysis of international university rankings and topics related to the quality of higher education.
Anyone wishing to contact Richard Holmes without worrying about ending up in comments can go to rjholmes99@yahoo.com

Sunday, December 23, 2012

The URAP Ranking

Another ranking that has been neglected is the University Ranking by Academic Performance [www.urapcenter.org] started by the Middle East Technical University in 2009. This has six indicators: number of articles (21%), citations (21%), total documents (10%), journal impact total (18%), journal citation impact total (15%) and international collaboration (10%).
A distinctive feature is that these rankings provide data for 2000 universities,much more than the current big three.
The top ten are:
1. Harvard
2. Toronto
3. Johns Hopkins
4. Stanford
5. UC Berkeley
6. Michigan Ann Argot
7. Oxford
8. Washington Seattle
9. UCLA
10. Tokyo
These rankings definitely favour size over quality as shown by the strong performance of Toronto and Johns Hopkins and the lowly position of Caltech in 51st place and Princeton in 95th. Still, they could be very helpful for countries with few institutions in the major rankings.

Saturday, December 15, 2012

The Taiwan Rankings

It is unfortunate that the "big three" of the international ranking scene -- ARWU (Shanghai), THE and QS -- receive a disproportionate amount of public attention while several research-based rankings are largely ignored. Among them is the National Taiwan University Ranking which until this year was run by the Higher Education Evaluation and Acceditation Council of Taiwan.

The rankings, which are based on the ISI databases, assign a weighting of 25% to research productivity (number of articles over the last 11 years, number of articles in the current year), 35% to research impact (number of citations over the last 11 years, number of citations in the current year, average number of citations over the last 11 years) and 40 % to research excellence (h-index over the last 2 years, number of highly cited papers, number of articles in the current year in highly cited journals).

Rankings by field and subject are also available.

There is no attempt to assess teaching or student quality and publications in the arts and humanities are not counted.

These rankings are a valuable supplement to the Shanghai ARWU. The presentation of data over 11 and 1 year periods allows quick comparisons of changes over a decade.

High-flyers in other rankings do not do especially well here. Princeton is 52nd, Caltech 34th, Yale 19th, Cambridge 15th most probably because they are relatively small or have strengths in the humanities.